I was hoping more people who use the terrain in their real-world project would try it out and comment, but since 1.8 is branched now we can probably justify just bringing it in to the unstable version now. What do the more active team members think?

Well, after a lot of work merging kuxv's changes with the latest ogre trunk and overcoming compilation problems, I want to report that the TerrainPaging sample is running really fine.
I'll report here how things work out when I try to bring my own project up to date with these improvements.

I should think so. Xiao has his endless wordl sample working flawlessly from what I remember. I'd post the question there and see if it triggers anything. You should be using his code since I'm sure he reworked a lot of code.